Discounts

Oracle Order Entry/Shipping allows you to set up a wide variety of discount types and methods to meet your pricing needs. You specify which price list uses the discount and whether the discount is automatic and overridable. All discounts have effective start and end dates for the discount, customers, or specific discount lines, allowing you to define seasonal or promotional discounts ahead of time.

Discount Types

Oracle Order Entry/Shipping lets you create discounts that support your pricing and discount policies. You can define discounts that are applied at either the order or order line level, and you specify whether the discount is automatically or manually applied to the orders. Oracle Order Entry/Shipping uses automatic discounts to calculate the selling price as you enter the order line, while manual discounts can be applied by an order entry clerk. When you define a discount, you specify whether it is overridable.

Customer-specific Discounts

Oracle Order Entry/Shipping lets you restrict discounts by specific customers, customer classes, and customer sites. You define customer classes and assign your customers to them in Oracle Receivables.

Order- and Item-specific Discounts

Oracle Order Entry/Shipping lets you create discounts for specific items, item categories, agreements, agreement types, order types, purchase orders, or any enabled pricing attribute. One discount can apply to an item, an item category, an agreement type, or an order type. For example, you want to have the same discount apply to a computer at 15 percent, the item category Electronics at 20 percent, your distributor agreement type at 25 percent, and your Western Region order type at 10 percent. If you enter an order for the computer, the discount is 15 percent. If you define the computer as part of the item category Electronics, then enter an order for the computer, the discount is 20 percent, the better of the two values. If you enter an order using either the distributor agreement or the Western Region order type, the appropriate percentage discount is applied if it is an automatic discount (or is available to apply manually if it is not an automatic discount). If your order is for the computer and uses both the distributor agreement type and the Western Region order type, then the discount on the order line is 25 percent, the best of the four available discounts.

Combination Discounts

Oracle Order Entry/Shipping lets you restrict discounts by combining customer/site and line discount criteria. For example, you can have an automatic discount that applies to a specific customer and item. Only order lines that match the combination of customer and item receive that discount.

Fixed-amount Discounts

Oracle Order Entry/Shipping lets you create a discount that specifies a fixed selling price. Whenever you use the discount, even if the list price of the item changes, the selling price is the fixed amount. Fixed price discounts are most commonly used to assist in managing GSA pricing. However, you can define a fixed price for any item on any discount.

Best Price

Whenever Oracle Order Entry/Shipping prices an order line, it calculates the best price for the customer for the order line, based on automatically applied discounts associated with the price list. For example, you have three different automatic discounts at 10 percent, 15 percent, and 25 percent. If all three are applied automatically to an order line, the resulting discount for that order line is 25 percent.

Price Break Lines

You can create price break discounts to reward your customers for purchasing larger quantities of a particular item. Oracle Order Entry/Shipping lets you define discounts that vary by item quantity or amount.

Prorated Discounts

Prorated discounts allocate the discount for one order line across multiple order lines for revenue purposes. When you define the discount, you indicate whether the allocation is across all lines on the order, or just lines in the same item category as the order line being discounted. Use prorated discounts to even out the revenue effect of sales if your salespeople discount some items more heavily than others and you do not want to affect the total revenue for the commonly discounted product. For example, you have a USD order with three lines: one for $100, another for $75, and a third for $60. The salesperson discounts the order line for $75 by 100 percent. This discount is prorated against all lines on the order, as shown in the following table.

As each order line is interfaced to Oracle Receivables, the difference between the invoice amount, which is used to create the receivables accounting transaction, and the revenue amount, which is used to create the revenue accounting transaction, is automatically captured in the Suspense Account. After all the order lines for an order with a prorated discount have been interfaced, the net effect in the Suspense Account for the transactions is zero (0).

There are restrictions on changes to orders using prorated discounts once one of the order lines has interfaced to Oracle Receivables. These restrictions maintain the integrity of the information interfaced to Oracle Receivables for the order.